Ethel Weed, Women's Army Corps officer in occupied Japan and advocate of the rights of Japanese women, was born in Syracuse, N.Y. She was the oldest of the three daughters and one son of Grover Cleveland and Berenice (Benjamin) Weed, both of British ancestry. Ethel attended school in Syracuse until her father, an engineer who had learned his trade through correspondence courses, moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1919. Grover Weed was a well-read man who enjoyed games, music, and travel and who encouraged his children to be adventurous. Berenice Weed, a homemaker, was very close to her oldest child and supported her efforts as a social reformer.

Ethel Weed attended Lakewood High School in Cleveland and Western Reserve University, earning an A.B. in English in 1929. She was the first of her family to seek a college degree. -After graduation, she worked for eight years as a feature writer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and then, for a brief period, worked and traveled in Europe. In 1937 she returned to Cleveland to pursue a public relations career and until 1941 was assistant executive secretary of public relations for the Women's City Club. She then opened her own office, handling publicity for various women's and other civic organizations.

In May 1943 Ethel Weed closed her business and joined the Women's Army Corps (WAC), a decision she made after talking with a WAC recruiter whose public relations tour to Cleveland she had arranged. Following basic training, she was sent to Officers' Candidate School at Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in August 1944. As an army public relations officer she did recruiting until 1945. At Officers' Candidate School Weed had heard about a course in Japanese studies to be held at Northwestern University to prepare a select group of twenty women officers for assignment in Japan once the war ended. Intrigued by the prospect of working in the Far East, she applied and was accepted.

Japan surrendered in August 1945, and Ethel Weed and her fellow WACs were soon dispatched to Yokohama on the first American convoy sent to Japan. Their mission was to help set up an Allied Occupation under Gen. Douglas MacArthur to demilitarize and democratize Japan. When Weed reported to General Headquarters in Tokyo in October 1945, she was given the title of Women's Information Officer in the Civil Information and Education Section, and assigned the task of formulating policy and developing "programs for the dissemination of information pertinent to the reorientation and democratization of Japanese women in [the] political, economic, and social fields." Operating initially from a borrowed table set up in a corner of General Headquarters, she began her work by developing a circle of Japanese women leaders who became her consultants and close associates. Most of these women had been leaders in the prewar suffrage movement and advocates of other women's rights causes in the 1920s and 1930s.

Weed's first big assignment was to promote women's suffrage, which had been granted in December 1945. American officials, confident that women would be a force for peace, wanted to assure a high turnout in the first postwar election on April 10, 1946. Weed undertook an extensive campaign to encourage women to vote, using radio shows, motion pictures, displays, press conferences, and other promotional methods. Despite press predictions that as few as 10 percent of the eligible women would vote, the women's turnout was an astonishingly high 67 percent, not far behind the rate for men. The election brought an unprecedented thirty-nine women into parliament, and Weed was widely credited for the successful outcome.

Another major area of her activity was promoting the development of women's clubs and organizations on a democratic basis. Drawing on her experience with women's clubs in Cleveland, Weed helped women leaders organize, and in some cases reorganize, such groups as the Women's Democratic Club, the Japanese Association of University Women, the Housewives' Federation, and the Japanese League of Women Voters. A pamphlet she prepared on how to run organizations according to democratic principles was widely used by women's groups throughout Japan. In recognition of her efforts in this and related areas, Ethel Weed received an Army Commendation Ribbon on Sept. 23, 1946.

During 1946 the Occupation initiated a number of legal reforms to improve the status of Japanese women. Weed worked closely with legal experts in revising the Civil Code, providing women freedom of choice in marriage, and equality under property, divorce, and inheritance laws. She also conducted a series of speaking tours throughout Japan to win women's support for such reforms. In 1947 she was instrumental in the formation of a Women's and Minors' Bureau within the newly established Japanese Ministry of Labor and from 1947 to 1952 she acted as the Bureau's defender, ensuring that the ministry would not restrict its funds. She also organized two major trips to the United States, in 1950 and 1951, for groups of Japanese women leaders. Her most important achievement, however, was to help women's groups understand and make use of their new legal rights.

Weed had resigned from the WACs in 1947 with the rank of first lieutenant, continuing her duties with civilian status until the last days of the Occupation. In April 1952 she returned to the United States. For a time she pursued a doctorate in East Asian studies at Columbia University, but she did not complete the degree. In 1954 Weed and her cousin, Thelma Ziemer, established the East and West Shop in New York City, a bookshop specializing in works on Asia. They moved the shop to Newton, Conn., in 1969.

Over the years, Ethel Weed maintained contact with a large circle of Japanese women from Occupation days. In 1971 she returned to Japan as their guest, and was honored by prominent government and civic leaders for her efforts of behalf of Japanese women. She died of cancer in Newton, Conn., in 1975.

The Women's Affairs Activity File, Nat. Records Center, Suitland, Md., includes memos, correspondence, reports, clippings, and other materials in English and Japanese relating to Weed's work as Women's Information Officer of the civil information and Education Section of the Occupation (1945-52). A smaller collection of her personal papers, clippings, and correspondence remains with the family.

Correspondence between Weed and Mary Beard is in the Beard Collection at Smith College. An account of Ethel Weed's activities in the Allied Occupation appears in Japanese in Shukan Shincho, ed., Makkasa no nihon (1970), and in Susan J. Pharr, "Soldiers as Feminists: Debate Within U.S. Occupation Ranks over Women's Rights Policy in Japan," in Merry I. White and Barbara Molony, eds., Proceedings of the Tokyo Symposium on Women (1979). A forthcoming book by Susan Pharr on political women in Japan provides background on Occupation initiatives in the area of women's rights and Japanese women's responses to those initiatives. Articles on Weed's career appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Aug. 25, 1944, Dec. 3, 1945, and March 17, 1946; the Cleveland News, Oct. 2, 1946; and the Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 4, 1946. Assistance was provided by Dr. Elizabeth (Weed) Van Hamersveld.

Pharr, Susan. Notable American Women: The Modern Period, A Biographical Dictionary. Eds. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green. Cambridge, MA., and London, England: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980, 721-723.